She slips the two brushes into a large jar of water, shaking the paint loose. Then she lifts a black lithographic pencil from her tabouret and signs her name in the lower right corner. Boldly. Proudly. The first time in too long a time that she has done such work. Doing it for a benefit instead of an editor. To help raise money for the homeless. Tonight.
Another goddamned deadline kept. With hours to spare. Thank God for water-based casein. Quick-drying acrylics. Someone is coming at nine, to carry the painting away for a quick scanning and a framing job, and delivery to the committee in charge of the benefit. The painting will be auctioned off. The scanners will turn it into a poster and all benefactors will receive personally framed copies a few weeks later. She thinks: This is the moment in the old days when I would have had a cigarette.
She stretches, moves her shoulders like rippling gears. Then glances at the Mac. Her true workshop. The homeless painting is the first work she’s done away from the Mac in two years. But she can’t sleep now. She has more work to do. She rolls the chair and sits down facing the screen. There’s a page on the screen, half the panels in black and white, half in color, alternating real world, virtual world. Page 5 of Like Mama. For Vanity Fair. Splash page, and four strip pages. All about a mild-mannered English teacher named Lois Trueheart, early forties, a spinster, like her creator. She’s been driven half mad by the way all the girl students use “like” in almost every uttered sentence. Sometimes twice. Or three times! And how they add question marks after statements of fact. As if all fact were conditional.
On Beverly’s splash page there’s an aerial shot of New York City, showing the skyscrapers, Central Park, the East River, parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Voice balloons are rising over the city, some large, others tiny, hundreds of them, many millions of others just suggested, all saying likelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelike… In class, in the corridors, in stores and churches and bars, on the streets, in the subway, maybe even in their sleep… He calls, and I’m, like, scared?… I finish and I’m, like, happy?… He’s handsome, but he’s, like, thirty?… I look at it, and it’s, like, awesome? One four-letter word blurring the city’s soundtrack, part of the pasty verbal mush, and on the splash page it’s crowding the sky among the many towers.
Is that girl scared, or is she like scared?
Is this one happy, or is she like happy? The guy is thirty, or like thirty, and his schlong is, like, awesome?
Where the twin towers once stood, an immense new steel and granite edifice, ominous, primordial, carries the name of the story: The Charge of the Like Brigade.
In a small panel at the bottom, Lois Trueheart holds her head in her hands, wracked with despair, alone at her desk in an empty classroom. On a blackboard behind her are the words “Precise, Clear, Exact.” Those words that mean, like, nothing to millions of young women. She clicks to the following page. A gigantic gray finger enters through the window, a finger with the crosshatched texture of stone, and touches her clenched hands. Then Lois is swept up and out the window, into the sky, whizzed to the far reaches of the galaxy, all the way to the Fortress of Exactitude, where she is placed before the ancient deity Gramaticus. He gives her the sacred task. To cleanse the English-speaking world of “like.” By any means necessary. She will become… Like Mama.
Beverly Starr laughs. A gust of rain sprays the room’s two windows. Hard and tiny pieces of the sky, drowning and silencing the earth, one pellet for each “like.” Millions. Billions. Cluster bombs from God or Gramaticus.
She lays down the stylus she uses for details, moves the chair back with her flat butt, hits “Save,” and rises. She is barefoot, in jeans and black T-shirt, inhaling the damp warm stale air of the room. She caresses the frame of the tablet/monitor, turns, runs the tips of her fingers over the top of the scanner. She glances at the painting of the homeless. They are, like, hurting. She places it on an easel, revealing a sheet of two-ply Bristol taped to the immaculate white surface of the table. Panels are drawn in blue pencil, lines laid for lettering. In the drawer to the right are the old tools of her trade: two Winsor & Newton sable brushes, two steel-nib pens, a crow quill, various pencils and erasers, markers and technical pens, an X-Acto knife, a single-edge razor blade, an old bottle of Higgins ink, with a jar of white beside it for corrections. The Luxo swing-arm lamp is off now, but it contains a fluorescent bulb and an incandescent one, balancing each other so that color stays true. There’s a T square too and a steel ruler, eighteen inches long, and a clear plastic triangle. She thinks: The tools Caniff used, and Will Eisner, and Noel Sickles. Tools I don’t use anymore.
She crooks her right arm as far as possible across the top of her head, grips the elbow in her left hand, and bends to the side. Twenty times. Facing a ten-foot-high mirror, she reverses hand and elbow and bends the other way. Her body is still lean and hard, buttless and almost titless, but she wears the same size 8 she wore at nineteen.
In Like Mama, Beverly uses herself as the model for Lois, an exclamation point in a Catwoman suit, improved by art into a 34C cup. The character has a secret lab in Red Hook, where she invents her own tools for the crusade: a stylus-sized secret weapon, with a button she can press when it’s slyly aimed at one of the Like Brigade. The girl says “like” and her thorax freezes, her eyes widen, she can’t finish a sentence? Like Mama presses the button again, and the young woman can speak, which she does nervously, until she says “like” again, and click! Frozen silence! Panic? She resembles a dog who has encountered an electric fence. Maybe the girl even gets what happened, connects “like” to paralysis. But Like Mama doesn’t stick around for Pavlovian results, as puny as this one might be. She is returning to the beginning of this, far from Brooklyn, in distant California. Google has taught her that Valley Girls were the Muslim Brotherhood of this linguistic perversion. Now they are Beverly’s age (or the same age as Lois Trueheart) and still talking that way, making it seem normal in certain households and classrooms, and Beverly realizes that she will need to invent a Weapon of Mass Obstruction. And then…
Now, listening to the rain, Beverly Starr looks down at a narrow blue padded mat spread across the floor. She kneels on the mat, stretches forward, facing the floor, her hands flat beside each shoulder. Then she rises, arching backward, pushing against the floor, forcing her back to crack. She is facing the Mac, a kind of supplicant, and when she comes up she can see the packed shelves of the Collection. And remembers trying to sell Bushwhacker to that guy from the World. The editor. Briscoe. The one-shot strip was about a woman who had the mysterious power to remove clothes from anyone. She chooses to strip clothes off George W. Bush. There he is with a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center, and the rescue workers are all laughing or smiling, and Bush is naked. His limp pecker hanging there. Yelling “Bring ’em on!” The crack of his ass is withered. He stands with Condoleezza Rice on the White House steps and she’s got a big grin, and Bush is balls-ass naked. He visits troops for Thanksgiving dinner in Iraq, and they are all laughing, and Bush is holding a tray with turkey and stuffing, his schlong resembling a week-old piece of broccoli.
Remembering: When she went to Briscoe’s office at the World and showed him the printouts, he laughed out loud and then said he couldn’t use them without folding the paper an hour after they came off the press. But he was having a dinner party that night at his place in SoHo and she was welcome to come if she had time. Why not? She was single. Free. No deadline. There were eight guests at the table in Briscoe’s loft: a political operator and his wife, a professor of French history from NYU and his wife, an unhappy woman novelist and her unhappy female companion, the painter Lew Forrest, and Beverly. The chef was from the French Culinary Institute, a man handsome in a vaguely sinister way. Forrest and Briscoe and the professor exchanged jokes in French. Beverly imagined her own mother at this table. Hawk-faced, her mouth a slash. Sneering, bitter. Muttering: Speak English, you schmucks. Full of the endless anger of the South Bronx, anger at the Depression, anger at the rich, the deck stacked against them all. Heard her: You wanna be what? An artist? Yeah? Go downstairs, sit on the railing, you meet plenty of artists, baby. Bullshit artists! Until one son went off to the army and died in Korea and the other son found heroin and died in Attica. And I invented Beverly Starr. Good-bye, Ruthie Rosenberg. Hello, Beverly.